New to the forum here. I've had my Raspberry Pi for a couple of months now but have only really had the chance to play with it this week.

My first curiosity around the R-Pi is it's potential use as a Media Centre using Raspbmc. I wanted to see if I could finally bring the 'PC into the living room' so to speak. I have, over the years, amassed around 1TB+ of Movie Rips (all backed up from my personal collection of course ), YouTube Clips and full DVD-R Backups.

I was quick to discover that R-Pi won't decode MPEG-2 or VOB due to licencing restrictions. FLV doesn't seem to work either. WMV's and MKV's are a mixed affair, often no sound. I guess that is a result of different codecs used from the variety of sources that this data has come from.

So in short, am I restricted to just playing MP4 and MKV stuff with the R-Pi? Do I have options with regard to transcoding any of my existing stuff so that it will play?

With regard to MP4 and MKV audio and visual content, what information am I looking for to ensure that R-Pi can playback successfully? What is the difference between DTS and AC3 Audio and can R-Pi handle both?

on the other hand, non-mp2 is a deal-breaker for me. I bought my Pi to play my 200 dvd mkv's in the living room.. but it won't play them. So I have a Pi that is a bit useless to me.. (wish they'd told me that before I bought it)

I am currently undergoing the process of converting my bluray rips to .h264 with an addition AAC audio track (the Rpi doesn't handle DTS 5.1 either). It's a massive operations, since there is about 1.5TB to convert. I will possibly write a script for it that just plows through my NAS.

After the conversion, I am happy to inform you that 1080p plays perfect, as long as you keep the audio to the AAC channel (unless you have a DTS decoder/pass-through thingie)!

I'm still hoping for the MPEG2 to be licensed anytime soon, as I was hoping to hook my DVB-C tuner to it and use it to record live TV. Which right now will not work, as the streams will be mostly in MPEG2 (for now). That's a kind of a disappointment to me

(07-26-2012 07:54 PM)iggy23 Wrote: on the other hand, non-mp2 is a deal-breaker for me. I bought my Pi to play my 200 dvd mkv's in the living room.. but it won't play them. So I have a Pi that is a bit useless to me.. (wish they'd told me that before I bought it)

who's they? Raspberry Pi foundation?
You bought a device designed to run and help teach kids linux/python.
It does that task fine so I don't see why "they" need to inform you of its inability to play MPEG2 before you buy (even though they have mentioned this many times before on their website).

(07-26-2012 07:54 PM)iggy23 Wrote: on the other hand, non-mp2 is a deal-breaker for me. I bought my Pi to play my 200 dvd mkv's in the living room.. but it won't play them. So I have a Pi that is a bit useless to me.. (wish they'd told me that before I bought it)

who's they? Raspberry Pi foundation?
You bought a device designed to run and help teach kids linux/python.
It does that task fine so I don't see why "they" need to inform you of its inability to play MPEG2 before you buy (even though they have mentioned this many times before on their website).

indeed

The data was there, it is not a out of the box mediacenter solution. Im sure Sam and the other guys(any girls? ) are gonna bring some nice stuff but they cannot go beyond the boundries of the pi. That comment was disrepectful towards the entire open source community imo.